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Western Outpost of Festivals

By SUSAN BENNER; Susan Benner is a writer who lives in Manitou Springs, Colo.

Published: July 12, 1987

As you drive in to Telluride, Colo., your eye is drawn to the peaks behind the town - Ajax, Telluride, Ingram. The purple-black of raisins and snow capped, they rise like softened pyramids more than 4,000 feet from the valley floor, and the floor itself is nearly 9,000 feet above sea level. Part of the San Juans, Colorado's youngest, largest, most southwestern mountain range and one of its most jagged, the peaks were formed by massive uplifts of the earth's crust, volcanic explosions and the resulting debris.

Telluride is small in area (maybe 15 blocks by 5) and in population (1,400 is the high estimate); no building is taller than three stories, and against the peaks the wide main street with its tiny false-fronted Western Victorian buildings looks like a movie set; the scale seems almost exaggerated. The town is dwarfed by the peaks. Against them people are tiny. This is, of course, more or less the effect of mountains everywhere, but in this valley the mountain sides are so close that they seem to press in, to enclose. And yet the effect is not claustrophobic but uplifting -the eye is drawn to the sky.

Whereas other mountain communities, such as Aspen and Vail, are larger and more sophisticated, Telluride feels removed from the modern world. It is tucked into a remote valley that was once sacred to the Utes, a hunting-gathering tribe that used to follow the migration of elk and deer. In Telluride you feel the otherness - the power and the rawness and the sheer physical beauty - of the West.

In winter one of Colorado's least crowded, least pretentious, most challenging and yet self-contained places to ski, Telluride in summer opens up, becomes a center for hiking and mountain biking, with an eclectic cluster of summer festivals as well as a cool base for exploring a bit of the Southwest. A two-hour drive from Mesa Verde National Park, the site of several of the most impressive Anasazi cliff dwellings, Telluride is an outpost for the ancient West as well as the old mining West and is near the northeastern edge of the area called Four Corners, the region surrounding the point where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado touch.

In summer Telluride's peaks are still skiable by those who can climb them or get to them by jeep or helicopter, but the ski runs that drop into town are broad swaths of green against the darker green of aspen and fir, waterfalls and rivers run freely, the alpine basins fill with wildflowers, old mining camps become accessible by trail, climbers dot the red cliffs, and hang gliders drift against a sky the blue of Crayola cornflower but softer. Nabokov compared it to the intense remembered blue of the skies of his childhood Russia. Here that literary lepidopterist chased butterfiles.

Like Aspen, Telluride was a mining town, the product of gold and silver booms and busts. Built quickly, from local lumber and stone, to accommodate the sudden influx of miners, it has the architectural pragmatism of a frontier town as well as the flourishes of found wealth: relatively simple, false-fronted frame and brick buildings, ornate tin ceilings and intricate moldings. Laid out on a grid, Telluride lacks the twisty prettiness of small New England villages. The main street, Colorado Avenue, is treeless and wide enough, local history books say, to turn around a team of oxen. The side streets are mostly dirt. Sidewalks tilt; dandelions grow in the cracks. And yet in this era of kitsch Western and pseudo Swiss, Telluride's roughness and the visibility of its past are part of its charm.

It's the kind of town where you can find oatmeal or muesli for breakfast and ahi with walnut butter or shrimp with garlic black bean sauce for dinner. Huevos rancheros one day, blackened salmon the next. Ride a mountain bike to a waterfall in the mountains and see an international film premiere in the afternoon. Rain may fall on your face while the sun is shining so brightly you need dark glasses. It has snowed in July.

At the zenith of its gold and silver boom, Telluride had a population of 5,000, 26 saloons and two dozen bordellos, including the Senate, where Jack Dempsey once washed dishes. Butch Cassidy robbed the bank. South of Colorado Avenue was the wild side of town, the place where nice girls didn't go. Pacific Avenue was known as Sporting House Row. About 175 ladies of the evening worked there at one time, and a tax on prostitution ($150 a house a week) was the most lucrative in town until the 1920's when business dropped off at the mines, and many of the houses closed. Though the mines stayed open under various owners until 1978, much of Telluride slept until the late 1960's when Joe Zoline, a Beverly Hills lawyer, businessman and horse racer, paid $150,000 for a 900-acre sheep ranch on the southern edge of town and started talking about building a ski area.

Telluride now has a population of about 1,400 people, six or seven saloons and no bordellos that I know of, though many of the old buildings still stand. The Senate is now a restaurant called Annabelle's; another of the houses, the Silver Belle, is an antique shop. The old stone jail is part of the library.